No One Lives
We’ve all done it. Sitting through some lesser horror picture, we stop rooting for the victims and start pulling for the guy with the machete. Sometimes it’s because the villain is delicious. More often it’s because the heroes are morons. They run upstairs. They hide in closets. They split up. We lose patience, then sympathy, and finally interest.
No One Lives starts from that instinct and asks: what if the monster were the protagonist, and we were meant to cheer?
It arrives under the banner of World Wrestling Entertainment, which should send you running. Don’t let it. Nobody gets hit with a folding chair and it isn’t a star vehicle for a wrestler. It’s a pure exploitation picture, born of the same impulse that drove the ’70s grindhouse circuit, and it has the good sense to want nothing more.
The setup is familiar. A couple drives cross-country through the humid South, stops at a roadhouse for dinner, and crosses paths with a gang of thieves. The crooks follow them, run them off the road, and start making plans involving blowtorches and bank PINs. This is their mistake. The man, played by Luke Evans, is a spree killer. Not a serial killer, he corrects someone. Serial killers deal in singularities. He’s a numbers guy.
That distinction plants him squarely in slasher territory—a smooth, self-aware Jason Voorhees who can make small talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if earlier drafts had him wear a mask during his kill sprees. He is not, however, some vigilante who only kills the wicked. His prior outing involved a houseful of dead college students and an abducted girl. He’s a monster. He just happens to be our monster this time. The movie knows this and grins at you.
Evans is terrific. From the opening frames he projects an eerie calm, a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, as though one bulb were burned out in a row. You sense a dead area. The script by David Cohen drops hints without letting the mystery hijack the story, and director Ryûhei Kitamura matches him beat for beat. When Evans checks into a dinky motel, Gary Grubbs appears as the operator, opening with a stale joke in an easy drawl, and you can practically smell the mildew in the carpet. It’s casting for type at its finest.
The gang makes for worthy adversaries, if only because they’re so awful. Among them is Flynn, played by Derek Magyar, a sociopath who opens the film by murdering a family that comes home while he’s robbing their house. He and Evans’s character make an interesting pair. Both lack empathy, but Evans’s character has embraced it and turned himself into something sleek and purposeful. Flynn, oblivious to his own psychopathy, functions as a blunt instrument. For a film this cheerfully shallow, the contrast gives you something to chew on.
The kills are staged with imagination and a streak of black humor the best ’80s slashers shared. A man wanders into a dark room, slips in a pool of blood, then realizes what he’s lying in. Later, you may wonder how two average-sized people could carry a corpse that must weigh close to three hundred pounds. The film answers your question. I won’t spoil the moment, but it drew a bark of laughter from me and announced that realism had left the building. If you want the gritty dread of High Tension or Martyrs, look elsewhere. If you grew up watching Jason dispatch campers in ways that defied anatomy and physics, welcome home.
Sure, some of the dialogue is stilted, and a few speeches try too hard to sound profound. But the film wisely refuses to explain Evans. He remains an enigma. We never learn his name. When the motel operator glances at his ID and says “Interesting name,” Evans replies: “Yeah, my father had an unforgiving commitment to historical reference.” That’s all you get. It’s enough.
I can imagine this film sharing a universe with The Collector, another underrated exploitation picture that clocks in under ninety minutes and longs to thrill its audience rather than punish it. Both films understand something important: you can be violent without being about violence. You can show terrible things and still be about the ride.
No One Lives is a hell of a ride.